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Over the last few years, I've checked out Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices
from a number of different manufacturers. I've tried devices from disk drive companies,
consumer appliance manufacturers and network device builders. But in this review,
I'm going to check out a NAS device from a company that is more normally known
for their expertise in RAID controllers: Promise Technology.

Setup

The SmartStor is a Bring Your Own Drive (BYOD) device, but Promise was kind
enough to supply me with a unit pre-populated with four one-terabyte drives. Four
terabytes of space in a device only a little larger than a toaster. Wow. Installing
SATA drives into the SmartStor would be fairly straightforward, but the rails used for
disk installation were the flimsiest I've ever seen. They were nothing more than
a strip of plastic that wrapped around the drive to form the rail.

In general, the device used a lot more plastic than I usually see. The use
of all this plastic made the device light, but it also made it a bit flimsy. The
plastic front door on my unit wouldn't completely close because of a poor fit.

The front of the device, seen above, had a disk access door, four rows of drive-status
LEDs, a power button and a one-touch backup button. The rear of the device, shown
in Figure 1 from the SmartStor manual, had a couple of USB ports, a power connector,
fan vent and a gigabit Ethernet connector.

Figure 1: SmartStor Back Panel

When I plugged in the device, I judged the fan noise to be fairly high. I wouldn't
want to use the device in a room that didn't already have noisy computer components.
Measuring the power-draw of the unit showed that it pulled around 60 W.
Although support for Linux and Apple computers is advertised, the only configuration
software provided (Figure 2) was for Windows systems, so I started out with my
XP instance.